Will Bulgaria enter the successful nations club? What role institutions play and why some states manage to establish more functional institutions than others? Is there a historical dogma that no state can hide or overcome? Is poverty a result of culture, climate, geography? The Harvard professor James Robinson is to hold a public lecture on the topic of “Why Nations Fail or Succeed? Implications for Bulgaria”. He is in Bulgaria as a guest to the Bulgarian School of Politics “Dimitry Panitza” with the kind support of “America for Bulgaria” Foundation.
The event will be held on 20 March (Thursday) in the Central Military Club, Sofia, Tarzhestvena Hall, at 6pm.
James Robinson is the David Florence Professor of Government at Harvard University where he has taught in the departments of Government, Economics and History since 2004. He studied economics at the London School of Economics, and completed a Ph.D. at Yale.
He is world-recognized expert on Latin America and Africa and has done research in Botswana, Mauritius, Sierra Leone and South Africa. His main research interests are in comparative economic and political development with a focus on the long-run with a particular interest in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. He is currently conducting research in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Haiti and in Colombia where he has taught for many years during the summer at the University of the Andes in Bogotá. Prof. Robinson became very famous through the book that he wrote together with Daron Acemoglu – “Why Nations Fail”. In order to find out the sources of economic progress, the authors of the book look at a number of examples from world history and divide the institutions in two kinds: inclusive and extractive. Based on 15 years of research, Robinson and Acemoglu present data since the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, USA and Africa and built on top of that a new political and economic theory that deals with the big questions of our times.